Bentsen pointed out that a $7 billion cut in state expenditures to Medicaid, the means-tested federal health care program for low-income people, proposed by Texas lawmakers to help address the state budget deficit, would actually result in a $20 billion tax burden that would hit the wallets of all Texas taxpayers.

Ouch.

How can this be? As Bentsen explained, half of the $20 billion hit comes because we would lose a federal match of about $10 billion as a result of the decision to cut state contributions to Medicaid.

Make no mistake: This is our money, ponied up to Washington in federal taxes. What's more galling is that it would go to other states to fund their Medicaid and Medicare programs. It might as well be sent in a box gift-wrapped in Lone Star red, white and blue.

And the other $10 billion? That's the amount this state's taxpayers will have to make up to pay for state and local services to cover the loss of federal funds. Some bargain, isn't it?

What's really hard to swallow is that this problem is obvious to anybody who pays the least bit of attention to how federal funding matches work, and has been for a long time. Shouldn't that include state leaders charged with making our public budget?

As Bentsen well knows, the lesson he is offering to our decision makers in Austin is really just remedial math. They should have learned it long ago, when we first fought funding battles over CHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Program. Like Medicaid, CHIP has a generous federal match. And, like Medicaid, the loss of CHIP funding hits hard at public health budgets paid for by hard-working Texans.

Are we really going to go through that exercise again with Medicaid?

To echo Bentsen: Where is the fiscal responsibility in this approach? Where is the taxpayer outrage? Where, pray tell, are the math brains of our state's leaders?